"I Don't Do Nuance"--George W. Bush

"Two years in prison is too long and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran."

So spoke Shane Bauer upon being released from the notorious Evin Prison in Iran, a prison infamous as a site of sadistic torture of criminals of all stripes, political, religious, and civil. As a statement it is, by any standard, strange. There is a saintly acceptance and absence of bitterness, a vague nod to a community of suffering and injustice, and just a touch of insanity. This is a young man plucked off the border of Iran in Iraqi Kurdistan while hiking with his girlfriend and his best friend, buried in a horrible prison for two years by a capricious and malicious government on idiotic spy charges, subjected to God-knows-what and reading this statement one can hardly tell.

Mr. Bauer then went on to thank people for helping him obtain his release including Hugo Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Sean Penn and Yusuf Islam (nee Cat Stevens) but curiously omitted thanking President Obama (who made a public plea for his freedom) or Mrs. Clinton, the Secretary of State.

Thanking Mr. Chomsky was telling. Last year Chomsky wrote, in an appeal for the hikers, "These young people represent a segment of the U.S. population that is critical of [U.S.] policies, and often actively opposed to them. Hence their detention is particularly distressing to all of us who are dedicated to shifting U.S. policy to one of mutual respect rather than domination." So some innocent who supported the American Middle East position would be a more appropriate victim?

Can the American and Iranian legal systems really be compared side by side? Are there really American political prisoners? Who are they and how did they get there? The American justice system has its faults but it meets in public, has layers of appeals, has an aggressive free press that monitors it and people like Mr. Bauer who overtly and freely oppose it. It took the Americans ten years to execute Ted Bundy, an ersatz Prince of Darkness. This is quite unlike Iran and equating the two has an anger ridden and fantastic quality about it. In this fairy tale world, if "two years in prison is too long" for an innocent man, what would be too short and what would be just right?

This is a difficult statement to understand. It assumes an innocence in the Iranian perpetrators and a guilt in the American victims that is staggering. Perhaps Mr. Bauer, who has a degree in "Peace and Conflict Studies" from Berkeley, has become a truly enlightened man, full of forgiveness. But that does not explain his willingness to judge the Americans more than harshly.

That judgement seems to come from a harder core, a source unawakened by the cruelest of Iranian circumstances.